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Authors: C. P. Snow
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‘My dear Lewis, this is extraordinarily good of you! How very kind of you to come! How very, very kind!’
He used to greet me like that when, as his second in command, I had been summoned to his office and had performed the remarkable athletic feat of walking the ten yards down the corridor.
He was bowing to Margaret, who had met him only two or three times before.
‘Lady Eliot! It’s far far too long since I had the pleasure of seeing you–’
His salutations, which now seemed likely to describe arabesques hitherto unheard of, had the knack of putting their recipient at a disadvantage, and Margaret was almost stuttering as she tried to reply.
Bowing, arms spread out, he showed us – the old word ushered would have suited the performance better – into the sitting-room, which led straight out of the communal hall. As I had calculated when we stood outside, they had only one main room, and the sitting-room was set for dinner, napery and glass upon the table, what looked like Waterford glass out of place in the dingy house. Round the walls were glass-fronted bookshelves, stacked with volumes a good many of which, I discovered later, were prizes from Marlborough and Oxford. A young lecturer or research student at one of the London colleges, just married, might have been living there. However, neither Margaret nor I could attend to the interior decoration, when we had the prospect of Rose’s wife herself.
‘Lady Eliot,’ said Rose, like a master of ceremonies, ‘may I present– Darling, may I introduce Sir Lewis Eliot, my former colleague, my distinguished colleague.’
As I muttered ‘Lady Rose’ and took her hand, I was ready for a lot of titular incantations, wishing that we had Russian patronymics or alternatively that Rose had taken to American manners, which seemed unlikely. It was going to be tiresome to call this woman Lady Rose all night. She was alluring. No, that wasn’t right, there was nothing contrived about her, she was simply, at first sight, attractive. Not beautiful: she had a wide mouth, full brown eyes, a cheerful uptilted nose. Her cheeks seemed to wear a faint but permanent flush. She must have been about forty, but she wouldn’t change much; at twenty she wouldn’t have looked very different, a big and sensuous girl. She was as tall as Rose, only two or three inches shorter than I was, not specially ethereal, no more so than a Renoir model.
Margaret gave me the slightest of marital grins, jeering at both of us. Our reconstructions of the situation…elderly people ‘joining forces’, marriage for company. If that was marrying for company, then most young people needed more of it. As for Rose’s putative plea, the only reason for reviving our acquaintance seemed to be that he wanted to show her off, which was simple and convincing enough.
In actual fact, as company in the conversational sense, she wasn’t a striking performer, as I discovered when we set out to talk. She was superficially shy, not at all shy deeper down. She was quite content to leave the talk to us, beaming placidly at Rose, as though signalling that she was pleased with him. I picked up one or two facts, such as that there had been another husband, though what had happened to him was not revealed. If there had been a divorce, it had been kept quiet. I couldn’t gather how she and Rose had ever met: she didn’t belong to any sort of professional world, she came perhaps – there was a residual accent – from origins like mine. I knew that when Rose left the service he had taken a couple of directorships: my guess was that he had come across her in one of those offices; she might have been his secretary.
Well, there they were, eyes meeting down the table. ‘Jane darling, would it be troubling you if you reached behind you–’ The one aspect which baffled me completely was why they should be living like students. It might have been one of the games of marriage, in which they were pretending to be
‘My dear Lewis, this is extraordinarily good of you! How very kind of you to come! How very, very kind!’
He used to greet me like that when, as his second in command, I had been summoned to his office and had performed the remarkable athletic feat of walking the ten yards down the corridor.
He was bowing to Margaret, who had met him only two or three times before.
‘Lady Eliot! It’s far far too long since I had the pleasure of seeing you–’
His salutations, which now seemed likely to describe arabesques hitherto unheard of, had the knack of putting their recipient at a disadvantage, and Margaret was almost stuttering as she tried to reply.
Bowing, arms spread out, he showed us – the old word ushered would have suited the performance better – into the sitting-room, which led straight out of the communal hall. As I had calculated when we stood outside, they had only one main room, and the sitting-room was set for dinner, napery and glass upon the table, what looked like Waterford glass out of place in the dingy house. Round the walls were glass-fronted bookshelves, stacked with volumes a good many of which, I discovered later, were prizes from Marlborough and Oxford. A young lecturer or research student at one of the London colleges, just married, might have been living there. However, neither Margaret nor I could attend to the interior decoration, when we had the prospect of Rose’s wife herself.
‘Lady Eliot,’ said Rose, like a master of ceremonies, ‘may I present– Darling, may I introduce Sir Lewis Eliot, my former colleague, my distinguished colleague.’
As I muttered ‘Lady Rose’ and took her hand, I was ready for a lot of titular incantations, wishing that we had Russian patronymics or alternatively that Rose had taken to American manners, which seemed unlikely. It was going to be tiresome to call this woman Lady Rose all night. She was alluring. No, that wasn’t right, there was nothing contrived about her, she was simply, at first sight, attractive. Not beautiful: she had a wide mouth, full brown eyes, a cheerful uptilted nose. Her cheeks seemed to wear a faint but permanent flush. She must have been about forty, but she wouldn’t change much; at twenty she wouldn’t have looked very different, a big and sensuous girl. She was as tall as Rose, only two or three inches shorter than I was, not specially ethereal, no more so than a Renoir model.
Margaret gave me the slightest of marital grins, jeering at both of us. Our reconstructions of the situation…elderly people ‘joining forces’, marriage for company. If that was marrying for company, then most young people needed more of it. As for Rose’s putative plea, the only reason for reviving our acquaintance seemed to be that he wanted to show her off, which was simple and convincing enough.
In actual fact, as company in the conversational sense, she wasn’t a striking performer, as I discovered when we set out to talk. She was superficially shy, not at all shy deeper down. She was quite content to leave the talk to us, beaming placidly at Rose, as though signalling that she was pleased with him. I picked up one or two facts, such as that there had been another husband, though what had happened to him was not revealed. If there had been a divorce, it had been kept quiet. I couldn’t gather how she and Rose had ever met: she didn’t belong to any sort of professional world, she came perhaps – there was a residual accent – from origins like mine. I knew that when Rose left the service he had taken a couple of directorships: my guess was that he had come across her in one of those offices; she might have been his secretary.
Well, there they were, eyes meeting down the table. ‘Jane darling, would it be troubling you if you reached behind you–’ The one aspect which baffled me completely was why they should be living like students. It might have been one of the games of marriage, in which they were pretending to be
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